NATURAL SELECTION IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION
The law of natural selection, or of the survival of the fittest, is not confined to plant and animal life. Its sway is universal. Every thing that is born, spawned, hatched, sprouted, conceived, invented, or founded is tested by this law, and if found inefficient, unfit, is weeded out, leaving the fittest, the best, the truest to survive.
On the mental plane the law of the survival of the fittest is often restricted in its operation, and the struggle unnecessarily prolonged, because of the intolerance of those of the older, dominant belief. The world lags because they refuse to permit the new idea to meet the old on equal terms before the only court having jurisdiction over truth and error—the court of Reason.
Intolerant people—and they are legion—either lack faith in the power of truth to triumph over error, or they harbor a lurking doubt in their own minds in regard to the amount of truth embodied in the belief they so anxiously shield. They regard belief—their belief—as something to be protected at any cost. Freedom of opinion, intellectual honesty, truth itself must yield rather than _their_ belief be in jeopardy. They seem to think it more blessed to believe something they received at second hand than to investigate and know the truth. With them it’s “Believe so and so; open your mouths like young mocking-birds and swallow it, smack your lips and call it good.” For people of that mental type to tell us to think—why, that is never thought of.
This forcing one to subscribe to a doctrine through fear, or to accept an idea on authority, belongs to the medieval age. And we resent it—we whose minds have not been altogether shaped by the kingly, priestly authority of five hundred years ago. We say, “Give us the evidences of your belief; if they are sufficient we cannot help believing. Let us meet in fair discussion and compare evidences. Drop your intolerance. Let your idea stand or fall on its merits—that’s all we ask of ours. Let the law of natural selection have a chance to operate.”
Not belief, but truth, is the one essential, and when discussion reveals the evidence supporting it belief is attracted to it like steel filings to a magnet. O ye of little faith, doubt not that in a struggle for existence between truth and error the fittest, that is, truth, will survive and error be eliminated.
Truth crushed to earth will rise again—
The eternal years are hers—
While Error, wounded, writhes in pain
And dies among her worshippers.
“A lie on the throne is a lie, still, and truth in a dungeon is truth, still; and a lie on the throne is on the way to defeat, and truth in a dungeon is on the way to victory.”
“If there is anything that cannot stand the truth, let it crack.”